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This Item Is the Archived Peer-Reviewed Author-Version Of This item is the archived peer-reviewed author-version of: Textual scars : Beckett, genetic criticism and textual scholarship Reference: van Hulle Dirk.- Textual scars : Beckett, genetic criticism and textual scholarship The Edinburgh companion to Samuel Beckett and the arts / Gontarski, S.E. [edit.] - ISBN 978-0-7486-7568-5 - Edinburgh, Edinburg University Press, 2014, p. 306-319 Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10067/1158860151162165141 Institutional repository IRUA This is the author’s version of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, ed. S. E. Gontarski, 2014, pp. 306-319. Please refer to the published version for correct citation and content. Chapter 22 Textual Scars: Beckett, Genetic Criticism and Textual Scholarship Dirk Van Hulle1 Beckett’s works deserve a scholarly bilingual edition. It has long been acknowledged that many of the texts of his works are inaccurate or even ‘replete with errors’ (Gontarski 2011, 357). Beckett himself told his biographer James Knowlson that his texts were in a terrible mess, and soon after Beckett’s death, several critical readers openly called for new editions (Fitch 1990). In 1992, John Banville wrote that ‘It is time now for all of Beckett’s work to be properly edited and published in definite and accurate editions that future readers be allowed to see them for the unique testaments that they are’ (the New York Review of Books, 13 August 1992). More than twenty years have passed and in the meantime, quite a few efforts have been made to provide new texts, with notable enterprises such as Charles Krance’s bilingual variorum editions of Company / Compagnie and A Piece of Monologue / Solo: A Bilingual Variorum Edition (1993a) and Mal vu mal dit / Ill Seen Ill Said (1996a), Magessa O’Reilly’s bilingual genetic edition of Comment c’est / How It Is (2001), Ruud Hisgen and Adriaan van der Weel’s genetic edition of WorstwardHo (1998), and the series of Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett (1993b-99), which contain ‘revised texts’, based on Beckett’s own revisions for the performances of his plays under his own direction. But these volumes are out of print. The momentum created by the Beckett centenary in 2006 resulted notably in a critical edition of The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, edited by SeánLawlor and John 1 The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 31360911. This is the author’s version of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, ed. S. E. Gontarski, 2014, pp. 306-319. Please refer to the published version for correct citation and content. This is the author’s version of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, ed. S. E. Gontarski, 2014, pp. 306-319. Please refer to the published version for correct citation and content. Pilling (2012), but in general, from a textual scholar’s point of view, the situation was dubbed ‘a centenary of missed opportunities’ (Gontarski 2011). But perhaps this need for a critical edition is also an opportunity, as it makes itself felt at an exciting moment in textual studies and genetic criticism. When genetic criticism or ‘critique génétique’ (the study of modern manuscripts and the process of writing) was establishing itself in the late decades of the twentieth century, it had to try and distinguish itself from traditional philology (Lebrave 1992; Grésillon 1994). In the meantime, genetic criticism has firmly established itself as a discipline in its own right and the time is propitious for a change of outlook, combining the forces of both scholarly editing and genetic criticism. One of the major merits of genetic criticism is its claim that the study of modern manuscripts does not need to be reduced to a subservient role at the service of the establishment of an edited text. The traditional demand for establishing a single, ‘stable’ reading text and the study of the instabilities of textual composition are hard to reconcile (Gontarski 1995: 196). Nonetheless, although genetic critics have repeatedly drawn attention to the differences between textual scholarship and critique génétique (Lebrave 1992; Ferrer 2002; 2010; 2011: 29), both disciplines can benefit from each other’s expertise. The research hypothesis of this essay is that a rapprochement between scholarly editing and genetic criticism can be established by means of an approach to textual ‘variants’ that values forms of creative undoing2 (ways of de-composing a text as an integral part of literary invention) more than has hitherto been the case in textual scholarship. Throughout the history of literature, the creative process has been regarded as either a constructive undertaking or as a process of growth, depending on the respectively constructive or organic metaphors that were current or dominant in different periods. But in this process of composition, decomposition plays a crucial role that is generally downplayed by authors and 2 Within Beckett studies, S. E. Gontarski’sThe Intent of Undoing (1986)gave currency to this term. This is the author’s version of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, ed. S. E. Gontarski, 2014, pp. 306-319. Please refer to the published version for correct citation and content. This is the author’s version of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, ed. S. E. Gontarski, 2014, pp. 306-319. Please refer to the published version for correct citation and content. scholars alike. Acts of decomposition can range from the selection of reading notes3 to forms of discarding, cutting, deleting, omitting, crossing out and revising in the act of writing. In terms of ‘decomposition’, Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre is paradigmatic for genetic criticism. His notes and manuscripts raise several challenges, both for scholarly editing and for genetic criticism: the role of the marginalia in the author’s personal library, the various types of notetaking, the bilingual geneses of some texts; the continuation of the genesis after publication; the documented activity of the author as self-translator; his role as director of his own plays and its impact on their textual representation and afterlife; the tension between completion and incompletion, between product and process; and the metafictionalthematization of this tension in his works. This essay focuses on ‘sutures’ in the published texts, which Beckett has often deliberately left unpolished, showing sometimes slightly unsettling ‘textual scars’ that remind readers of the text’s eventful past and draw attention to its often ‘unsettled’ nature. This textual situation will serve as a starting point to explore the possibilities of a bilingual edition of Samuel Beckett’s works that combines the expertise of genetic criticism and scholarly editing, and that enables readers to explore both the synchronic structure of the texts as ‘finished products’ and the diachronic structure of their writing processes, making use of both print and digital media. ‘Under the skin’: The diachronic structure of texts 3James Joyce referred to his practice of ‘notesnatching’ as ‘decomposition’ in a self-referential passage of Finnegans Wake: ‘Our wholemolemillwheelingvicociclometer, a tetradomationalgazebocroticon (the "Mamma Lujah" known to everyschoolboy scandaller, be he Matty, Marky, Lukey or John-a-Donk), autokinatoneticallypreprovided with a clappercouplingsmeltingworksexprogressive process, (for the farmer, his son andtheir homely codes, known as eggburst, eggblend, eggburial andhatch-as-hatch can) receives through a portal vein the dialyticallyseparated elements of precedent decomposition for the verypetpurpose of subsequent recombination’ (Joyce 1939, 614, lines 27-35; emphasis added) This is the author’s version of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, ed. S. E. Gontarski, 2014, pp. 306-319. Please refer to the published version for correct citation and content. This is the author’s version of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, ed. S. E. Gontarski, 2014, pp. 306-319. Please refer to the published version for correct citation and content. In The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Hofrat Behrens – a doctor who is not only familiar with medical X-ray techniques but is also an amateur painter – describes his painting technique by taking the underlying layers into account. Michael Maar interprets this moment as a description of Mann’s own writing method, more specifically his so-called ‘layering technique’ (‘Schichtentechnik’; Maar 1995, 13). Behrens argues that the ‘depth’ of a painting is just as important as its surface: ‘what a man thinks and imagines, that gets expressed, too. Those things flow into his hand and have their effect. It isn’t there and yet it is – and that makes for life-likeness’ (Mann 1996, 255).4 Having some idea of what is under the skin can be advantageous – ‘das kann von Vorteilsein’ (Mann 1990, III.361) –, for artists, writers, readers and researchers alike: It’s a good thing – certainly doesn’t hurt – if a man knows something about what’s what under the epidermis and can paint what cannot be seen. Or in other words, when a man’s relationship with nature is something different from the, let us say, purely lyrical. When, for example, he’s a part-time physician, physiologist, and anatomist with some intimate knowledge of life’s undergarments. It can work to his advantage. Say what you like, it is a certain plus. (Mann 1996: 255)5 Applied to literary texts, Behrens’s explanation of his painting may serve as a guideline for a method of editing I would like to suggest for a scholarly edition of Samuel Beckett’s works.
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